


Lost Light

by northernexposure



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friendship, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:01:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28112820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northernexposure/pseuds/northernexposure
Summary: Another year, passing.
Relationships: Chakotay/Kathryn Janeway
Comments: 53
Kudos: 106





	Lost Light

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not really here any more, and yet... here I am, wishing everyone as good an end to a horrible year as possible, and sending hope that next year will be better for us all. 
> 
> Thanks, as ever, to MissyHissy3 for the super-fast beta.

“Sometimes,” she says, and she’s looking out of the ready room window at something too far away to see, “I can’t remember being anywhere other than here.”

Chakotay watches her silently. He’s been aware for a while that the Captain’s mood has dipped. He’s almost sure that no one else has seen it, but he has. For the past two or three weeks her usually avid attention has been overlaid by something heavy, something dark. When she smiles, bright as a supernova as the expression may be, he can tell that she’s faking it. _She’s a good actress_ , he thinks, as if this wasn’t something he’d become aware of almost before anything else he knew about her. She puts on a good show, does Kathryn Janeway. She’s got armour that makes her about as vulnerable as a tritanium-reinforced hull with its full shield array engaged.

That’s why it’s so disturbing when something gets through.

At his silence she turns to look at him, her eyes half in shadow, and he wonders for a moment if she realises she’s spoken aloud. It was a non sequitur that had nothing to do with the conversation they’d been having, which had involved Neelix’s increasingly elaborate plans for this year’s Prixin. Then she turns away again.

“I say that,” she adds, “because I wonder at the wisdom behind marking the length of our sojourn out here in quite so definitive a way.”

Chakotay shifts a little. Unconsciously he’s adopted a stand-easy stance, hands clasped lightly behind his back, feet planted apart, but that’s as relaxed as he’ll become in this situation. A year ago, two, he would already have been standing beside her, probably with one hand on her shoulder. Now, though, the distance they have travelled in that time is marked not only outside the ship, but inside it too, between them. It’s a chasm he does not know how to cross, or whether he should, nor even if he has any desire to try.

“The crew look forward to it,” he says. “I think they’d miss it if it wasn’t on our calendar.”

The Captain has her back to him again. There’s a brief pause and then she nods. “You’re right, of course, Commander. Very well. Let me know if there’s anything Neelix needs me to approve.”

It’s a dismissal. When he leaves her there, she’s still looking out at the stars.

Later, Chakotay stops by to see how Neelix’s preparations are coming. The Talaxian and Naomi Wildman are busy putting up decorations – mountains of them, it seems, most of which the pair have made themselves. He helps Naomi string the dried seed pod of some alien plant alongside a piece of approximated popcorn, and then notices that also on the table is a pile of printed images.

The first one catches his eye because although it’s a picture of a child, it only takes Chakotay a second to realise that the child is Harry Kim. In it Harry can be no more than five years old. He’s rosy-cheeked beneath a felted hat that for some reason has antlers, bobbly eyes and a red nose on it. He’s swamped by a thick coat and laughing, standing thigh-deep in snow.

“What are these?” Chakotay asks, picking up the pile of pictures and beginning to look through them.

“Oh, that was Naomi’s idea,” Neelix says, “and a brilliant one it is, too. We’re going to pin them up around the room for the party.”

“I asked people for their favourite holophotos of Christmas,” Naomi explains. “I know Prixin isn’t exactly the same, but I’ve never had a Christmas. And then I thought it might be nice if-”

The girl continues her chatter, but Chakotay has tuned out a little. Another photograph has caught his eye. A barely teenaged Tom Paris is standing front and centre amid a small group that has gathered around a huge tree lit with hundreds of glittering white lights. The boy is in the process of hurling a snowball straight at the camera. The tree lights constellate beneath a dark and starless sky, but as brilliant as they are, they fade to nothing in the light of the smile of a young woman who stands in the background, almost out of focus. Maybe 18, no more than 20, she’s looking up at the tree, a woolly hat pulled low over her ears. She clutches a paper cup that Chakotay is willing to bet holds coffee, as willing as he is to bet that he would know that smile anywhere.

“Isn’t that a great picture?” Naomi says, standing on tiptoe to peer at it with him. “And look, there’s Captain Janeway! Can you see her, at the back? Tom says that it was taken when she was a cadet home from the Academy for the holidays one year. Their families always had a big party. He loves this picture because of the tree. He says Christmas isn’t Christmas without a tree. I think it’s beautiful, don’t you?”

Chakotay, still blinking at the brilliance of that smile, agrees.

Over the next few days he thinks about that Kathryn Janeway, distant in so very many ways, but it isn’t until he wakes from a dream in which he is the one who put the coffee into her hands that Chakotay realises that what he is feeling is regret. For her, for himself. He can’t go back two years, or twenty, he can’t pass her that coffee, can’t stand in the light of that smile, that tree. He can’t ever know her as she was then. He wonders if she even remembers that moment, or whether the half-life of that light has been spent, driven even from the peripheries of her memory by the darkness of all the years, light and otherwise, that came after.

No, he can’t turn back the clock. It occurs to him, though, that perhaps there is something he _can_ do. The minute he thinks of it, Chakotay dismisses the notion as ridiculous. He moves on, gets on with his day, but still - it stays with him. The idea lurks at the back of his mind, occasionally flashing to the forefront, along with the memory of that smile.

Should he? _Can_ he? It’s worth a try, isn’t it?

For the next few days after that he spends his off-hours scavenging, surreptitiously searching for items he would be unable to adequately explain his need for were any of the crew to ask. He searches the cargo bays, he makes sly visits to hydroponics. He saves his replicator rations, subjecting himself to Neelix’s cooking more regularly than he would like, doing without what he can in order to scrape together what he needs. Prixin draws nearer and he’s not even sure if this is a good idea at all. Likely it will fall short, as so many things have in the years they’ve been aboard _Voyager_. He continues though, and knows that he is doing this for himself as much as for her. Because he knows that somewhere in his past, too, is a version of himself so much brighter than the one she now knows. Because he wants to believe that there is a way to regain that past self while understanding there can be no return to it. He still wants to believe that ahead can be as bright as behind, and wants her to believe that again, too.

It takes a lot of trial and error, and most of his rations are wasted on experiments that do not work. Even with all his efforts the result is imperfect, but Chakotay has had a lifetime of working with what’s available, rather than what he actually wants and needs. On the morning of the day before Prixin he stands in his quarters before he goes on duty, looking at the product of his labours. He wonders again whether he should just forget the whole thing. He already knows that it won’t be enough to turn back the tide of darkness that is subsuming her bit by bit and isn’t even sure, anymore, if she would appreciate him trying. Defeated, he leaves for the bridge having made up his mind that at the end of his shift he’ll get rid of it, wasted rations being the least of his worries.

On the bridge the talk is all of Prixin, the crew buzzing with an energy that makes him smile. Janeway is quiet, remaining in the ready room for most of the day, and when Chakotay goes to take her a report she has requested he finds her once more looking out at the dark spaces between the stars.

“Is there possibly a way,” she asks him, “that I can skip tomorrow night?”

He wants her to be there, because the thought of her holed up alone in her quarters while the rest of them enjoy themselves digs a hole straight through his heart. At the same time, he wishes he didn’t have to be the one to tell her she must attend, because he hates the thought of forcing her to do yet one more thing she does not want to do. She has nothing that is her own, not even time.

“The crew would miss you, Captain,” he tells her. “They will notice if you’re not there. I think it’s important that you attend.”

She turns but doesn’t look at him, and the shape her mouth is making should be a smile, but it isn’t. “Of course.”

“It… doesn’t have to be for long.”

She nods, and turns away again.

When Chakotay gets back to his quarters after his shift, he is surprised by a festival of lights. He must have forgotten to turn them off before he left, and they sparkle and shift against the drab of his Starfleet walls like physical magic. Their light hides the imperfections of what is beneath. They make it beautiful.

He keeps it, after all, because he knows, now, what to say.

The next day is uneventful. Janeway has decreed a skeleton crew for Prixin. The corridors hum with chatter and merry intent. Janeway sequesters herself in her ready room again, only coming out at the end of her shift when the rest of the bridge crew have mostly already clocked off for the party. Chakotay has conspired to still have reports to finish, and is at work on them when she stops by to tell him she’s leaving the bridge.

“I’m going to change before I go down to the holodeck,” she says. “I’ll see you there?”

He smiles. “Yes. I’m nearly done here.”

She nods and leaves. He waits until the turbolift doors have shut behind her and goes straight to the ready room. Once there, he executes the site-to-site transport he painstakingly arranged the night before. He’s spent some time thinking about where best to situate it, and has decided it should stand in the spot he has seen her in so many times recently, under the stars.

Janeway sounds impatient when she answers his comm call. He’s guessing she’d barely reached her quarters. _“Chakotay? What is it?”_

“I’m sorry, Captain, but I’m going to need you to come back to the ready room.”

_“What – now?”_

“Well, before you go to the party.”

There’s a pause. _“What’s happened? Is the ship under threat?”_

“No, Captain. There’s nothing to worry about.”

_“Well, what then?”_ Her annoyance is clear.

“It’ll be easier to show you, Captain. It won’t take long.”

He hears her sigh. _“All right. I’m going to change first. I’ll be ten minutes. Janeway out.”_

Chakotay is waiting under the window when she walks in. Janeway strides through the doors as if going into battle, looks around and then comes to an abrupt stop. It takes her a moment to register what she’s seeing, and when she does her mouth drops open.

“What-”

“According to Tom Paris,” Chakotay says, from where he’s leaning against the bulkhead, “Christmas isn’t Christmas without a tree. And yes, I know that this is Prixin, not Christmas, but out here this is the closest we’re going to get.”

It’s eight feet, tall enough to brush the ceiling, constructed of painted wood and replicated branches of silver-green Scots pine, festooned with as many lights as he could make. It’s ridiculous, and it’s out of place, but as she walks closer the light reflects off her face and there, just for a second, he sees that young woman, the one in the photo from so long ago, and she is as bright as she has ever been, and as beautiful besides.

There is a silence and then suddenly Janeway laughs, a spontaneous sound that is both happy and free. “You _built_ this? For me?”

“Yes.”

“But – _why_?”

Chakotay pushes away from the bulkhead. “I know you find this time of year hard,” he tells her. “I know that for you, every Prixin is a reminder that we’ve been out here for another year. But here’s the thing. Every one of these we celebrate means we’re another year closer to home.”

She laughs again, a softer sound this time. “That’s… a very _you_ way of thinking about things.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

She smiles at that, but says nothing. She’s still looking at the tree.

“Every Prixin also marks another year that we’ve survived, together,” he adds, quietly. “And Kathryn - I will celebrate that for as long as I possibly can.”

He sees her eyes fill with tears. The lights of the tree glint off them as they fall. It seems as if she doesn’t know what to say, or is perhaps unable to say anything, because instead of speaking she reaches out a hand to him. Chakotay takes it, her fingers cool and smooth in his. He doesn’t say any more. He doesn’t think he needs to. She’s tearful, but she’s smiling, too. She’s looking at the lights, instead of away from them.

After a while she nods, once, and wipes her face with her other hand. Then she laughs and shakes her head. Her hand is still in his.

“You know,” she says, and her voice is gravel caught in an empty gas tank, back when the world was filmed in black and white, “I had forgotten just how much I love a lit Christmas tree. Thank you, Chakotay.”

“It’s nothing,” he tells her, and this is both utterly true and a total lie.

She wipes her face again and finally pulls her hand away from his. “We’re going to be late.”

“I doubt anyone will mind. I should think they’re all digging into the punch right around now,” he says, mildly.

Janeway sighs. She’s still gazing at the tree, looking a little wistful. “Still. We’d better go.” Then she brightens again. “Oh! Let’s take it with us.”

“What, the tree?”

“Do you mind? I feel as if I want to share it. Besides, if it stays here I won’t be able to look at it all night.”

Chakotay smiles at her enthusiasm. It feels familiar, welcome. “Of course I don’t mind.”

Janeway goes down to her desk and activates her terminal. There’s a lightness to her step that wasn’t there before.

“Not sure I should really use a site-to-site for this, but what the hell, it’s Prixin,” she says, and this time it’s Chakotay who laughs.

She comes back towards him. They stand in front of the tree, together. For a moment everything is still. There’s nothing but them and a light that he had feared lost. He can’t stop himself brushing a stray strand of hair back behind her ear.

She smiles, her face suffused by cast light, and Chakotay knows that for the first time in a long while, there’s nothing fake about it.

[END]


End file.
